8 Surprising Uses For Sheds

They're a man's refuge (47 percent of men say they've spent a whole day in their shed), storage space for all those things you promise yourself you'll need someday, and the ideal place for mechanical research, more commonly known as "tinkering around." Frank Hopkinson's new book, The Joy of Sheds, is full of trivia about these backyard buildings. Here are the stories of people who used their sheds for more than storing tools.

Silicon Shed

Silicon Shed

Technology giant HP is one of the many companies that started in shed-like premises. Though technically a garage, the structure at 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto, Calif., was detached from the main building and was, for all intents and purposes a shed. Inside, Stanford University classmates Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard produced their fledgling company's first product: an audio oscillator, an electronic test instrument used by sound engineers. The shed has since been refurbished and rebuilt and stands today as California Historic Landmark No. 976, "Birthplace of Silicon Valley."

The Radioactive Boy Scout

The Radioactive Boy Scout

When three men in white suits and respirators crossed her lawn holding Geiger counters—that was the first time Dottie Pease knew about David Hahn's attempt to build a model breeder nuclear reactor in his shed. The men, who were from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, broke the shed up, filled 39 barrels, and sent it all off to a low-level waste disposal site in the Great Salt Lake Desert.

Hahn's 1995 project to produce cheap energy at the bottom of his garden had resulted in dangerous levels of radiation at his Michigan home. Hahn had meticulously collected and refined beryllium, americium from smoke detectors, radium from luminous paint, thorium from gas mantles, and lithium from batteries. The 17-year-old Eagle Scout, who got his scouting merit badge for atomic energy in 1991, realized that he might have accumulated too much radioactive material in one place when he started picking up signals on his home Geiger counter five houses away from his shed. At one point he put some of the material in the trunk of his old Pontiac to split the sources up. When police pulled him over in a unrelated incident, they found what they thought was a home-made atomic bomb in the back.

Of his exposure to radioactivity, Hahn said, "I don't believe I took more than five years off my life."